Mark Cuban stood alongside Trump to tout the regime's adding 602 more drugs to a government website routing patients to mail-order providers like his Cost Plus Drug Co. Few patients will benefit.
The same people who always benefit will reap the rewards of this Trump scam: The rich! Trump said himself he doesn't give our economic stress a second thought, and Cuban didn't get to be a multi-billionaire by being Mr. Nice Guy, either!
Direct or cash-pay schemes for Rx don't really scale because 90% of prescriptions are generics - and the margins are razor thin. Walmart has a sizeable (and growing list) of $4 generic drugs and generics are not where big pharma makes most of their money.
When manufacturing margin drops below a certain amount - the manufacturer doesn't just keep lowering their price - they stop manufacturing that drug altogether. As of last April (2025) there were ~270 drug shortages and each shortage affects ~500,000 people. Any savings Cuban passes through may be helpful to a select few - but he's kidding himself if he thinks he's "f*&^ing with healthcare." All he's doing is rearranging deck chairs.
I come at it differently, being on regular Medicare with a Part D supplement. I'm on a cocktail of meds, so I have no choice but to be on my toes with every script, starting with an annual review of my drug plan.
Even with that, things change - and rather radically. This year, with the $2000+ cap, the cost of the expensive drugs WENT UP - almost so they would game the $2,000 cap. CRAZY!
So, given the prices of some of what I use, including generics that SHOULD be cheap, I use Cost Plus, as I have since it started. Some years, I get multiple meds from them. Some none or one.
I also occasionally check WMT, but it's never been better. (Though it was a lifesaver a number of years ago for one of our dogs, who had diabetes; their insulin prices were impressively lower than everybody else's - and not by a small amount.)
And I also use one that often gets forgotten - GoodRX, because there are times it can save HUNDREDS of dollars, without paying extra for their premium plan. (I'm very serious about that: My wife recently got very ill and had to get a med that is crazy expensive ON our plans. With GoodRX, we reduced the price by hundreds of dollars. THIS IS NUTS!)
I also regularly check independent pharmacy prices, via my supplement's website, for my covered meds or even uncovered drugs, because sometimes they're considerably lower. That's where Cost Plus comes in. THIS IS INSANE!!!!
You and I are lucky, because given our backgrounds, researching this is second nature and even, dare I say, fun. But it's confusing, and I can't imagine how the average person does it.
I didn’t mean to suggest that a patient/consumer couldn’t save money by using one of the mail-order pharmacies. Even I could have saved $20-$30 a year for my generic thru Cost Plus. But who captures the other savings by cutting out the insurer and PBM? Will it result in lower premiums for me or higher profits for CVS Caremark, who manages my drug benefit for Cigna, my supplemental insurance provider? The broader point I was trying to make was that these work around online sellers deal mostly with low cost generics, and do little to address the real cause of escalating drug spending, which is escalating prices for new and still on-patent drugs.
Someone was floating Cuban for president. NOPE. Not another rich guy selling a plan.
Any and I mean ANY COLLABORATION WITH trump is a no for me and mine. He’s separating families again so where’s Congress with this? Mullen/ Holman are still cruel they are just doing it in smaller towns. 22,000 children have had BOTH PARENTS IN DETENTION OR DEPORTED. Over 100,000 children total have been affected. 75% if all the detained : have been shown to be AMERICAN CITIZENS IN THISE THEY HAVE FOCUSEd ON.
You support trump at all yiu support this too!
And the Ep files were due Dec2025!( last yr!!) again forget it trump. Forget Cuban.
I did look up a drug I need and my insurance doesn’t wanna pay for it. Cuban and Amazon doesn’t have it
Merrill et al: To compare TrumpRX with Mark Cuban's drug database is no longer relevant, since Cuban has added his database to Trump's. (I am quite sure one can access Cuban's DB without going thru Trump's, as well as by going thru T's.) To me it is funny that Trump now boasts that TrumpRX has 600+ meds... since a majority (over 550!) are Cuban's.. Also funny is that Cuban is getting flack for "going with" Trump, whom he has been known to detest.. Here is an interesting YouTube video that discusses this strange "marriage." (Again, Cuban is NOT a Trump fan. . not by a long shot. He just wants to help the American public) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G1lgZ9VUDe8 -- And by the way, to people who are on so many meds... maybe some of them were prescribed to treat the side effects of other meds! Gotta watch these docs!!
Since you're a bit on the topic of the ACA, and the cuts that just happened with the expiration of the expanded subsidies on 1/1/26, let me first mention that there is leaked information that CMS has data on large losses in coverage that it has not yet released.
Further, they appear to be preparing to falsely claim the coverage drops are due to reduction of fraud on the exchange. (I think I see some of how this propaganda has been set up--I have stuck that on as a reply to this comment.)
The source is this recent NOTUS story by former Washington Post Reporter Paige Winfield Cunningham, which post seems to access leaked information from people inside of CMS:
"More than one in five people who enrolled in health insurance through http://healthcare.gov/ during open enrollment and in the weeks immediately following were dropped from coverage for failing to pay their first month’s premium, according to internal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, documents obtained by NOTUS that haven’t been made public.
The roughly 21% decline in enrollment in the 30 states using the federal marketplace is significantly higher than the rate of last year, when 12% of enrollees dropped off over the same time frame.
The numbers support widespread fears that the end of extra, pandemic-era subsidies, which congressional Republicans declined to extend in December, would leave Affordable Care Act plans unaffordable for some Americans.
Faced with such a stark drop in enrollment, leadership at CMS, which is led by Administrator Mehmet Oz, is seeking to attribute a majority of the enrollment declines to rooting out fraud rather than people not paying their premiums, according to three CMS sources. The sources said it’s unlikely fraud is behind most of the cancellations."
Charles conclusion is that it looks like, of 24 million people who had on-exchange ACA coverage, about 3 million (12%) are without coverage as of the current time this year, due to the lapsing of the ACA expanded subsidies on Jan 1, 2026.
ADDING BACKGROUND--initial limited (released) CMS data, and data rolling in from non-CMS sources:
The information here is part of the new data that continuously rolls in, as initial very limited open-enrollment-period only data, which counts people auto-renewed as having coverage, even if they don't wind up paying the premium, gets superseded. (That limited initial data showed only a 4.9% coverage drop for those 24 million.)
Also, I might as well toss in unique reporting by both Charles Gaba and myself that, in order to try to get themselves under the returned 400% of Federal Poverty Level (FPL) "subsidy cliff", and avoid premium jumps of up to tens of thousands of dollars from what they paid last year, a few hundred thousand people seem to have pushed their income under the "subsidy cliff". Some will have done this legitimately, by working less or other legal means. Others of them will find, if their income is over the subsidy cliff at tax-filing time in 2027, that they have to pay the up to tens of thousands of dollars they thought they were saving back to the federal government. (A very unpleasant surprise, indeed! ; For those interested in how we figured that out , details are to be found within this comment: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/unlocked-repost-curing-us-health/comment/255658440 . )
Appending: Details on what may be the outline of the propaganda claiming the CMS data, when released, showing large coverage drops, is due to mainly fraud reduction.
I am using a recent New York Times story mentioning the “Paragon Health Institute” and fraud in California ,
where there is talk of the Trump administration witholding $1.3 billion dollars in Medicaid payments to California based on fraud allegations.
There is also mention of Dr. Oz, head of CMS, speaking at an event hosted by the Paragon Health Institute, talking about the fraud, saying “something is clearly wrong”.
Now "Paragon Health Institute", and Dr. Oz, both even separately, suggest to me propaganda and, at best, erroneous analyses. With the one at an event hosted by the other, the suggestion becomes overwhelming.
My Reasons:
1) The Paragon Health Institute has been involved in some analysis that I, and some organizations with large technical staffs, have questioned.
1a) Paragon Health Institute has attacked the ACA based on findings of fraud, which findings were based substantially on ACA “zero-claim enrollees”, being people with an ACA plan, who never file a claim.
I looked into this, and Paragon’s general policy advice, a bit myself within these two posts from months ago:
and, not only did many of the analyses look fishy to me, but, as on that second post, I found out that several organizations with large technical staffs also took issue with the analyses.
It is therefore imperative that policymakers understand that Paragon developed these allegations using inaccurate data, dubious assumptions, and an apparent lack of understanding of how health insurance actually works.
(Incidentally, about 6 months ago Paul Krugman addressed the how insurance actually works issue, with an example of you can have fire insurance, and not filing a claim does not mean you shouldn’t have had insurance. He did not attack Paragon, or its head, Dr. Brian Blase, by name, but he must have been thinking of those fraud allegations. That Krugman post is: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-republican-brain-doesnt-want )
1b) Paragon Health Institute produced a graph which was used by both Senate Majority Leader John Thune (in this video, from the day the Senate voted against extending the expanded subsidies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWmkb_rdUrI&t=287s) and House Majority Leader Mike Johnson (in this tweet:
Now, the thing is, I’m pretty sure that graph is completely erroneous, due to mainly an omission of a certain cost, and a shifting of one of the graphs. When I tried to adjust for the errors, I got that the ACA plan cost tracked in the graph rose either slightly more, or slightly less, than employer-based plan.
2b) More technical, but there is a case where Dr. Oz seems to indicate that something that the Republicans are trying to do makes ACA coverage cheaper when it actually does the EXACT OPPOSITE. (That’s within here: https://normspier828307.substack.com/p/cost-sharing-reductions-silver-loading , though I warn you, it is quite technical around “cost-sharing-reductions” and “silver loading”.)
3) There is a general playing on many of the voters not having a sense of numerical quantities.
The total federal spending on healthcare is $1.9 trillion ($1900 billion) a year, and, incidentally, the OBBB Medicaid and ACA expanded subsidy cuts that the shutdown of late last year was trying to reverse are $150 billion a year.
So, the numerically-skilled mind sees federal share of healthcare spending in California is about $190 billion a year (since CA has almost exactly 10% of the U.S. population), and the $1.3 billion withheld according to the Times story, let’s say it really is because of fraud, is about 1/150 of the spending.
Ditto if you take the Dr. Oz / Fox fraud by “Criminal Illegal Immigrants”. $1 billion, compared to $1900 billion a year in total federal medical expenditures, or even the $150 billion a year the Republicans have cut (combined OBBB and lapsed ACA expanded subsidies.)
--
P.S. I am curious as to why only Dr. Oz and Paragon are involved in the propaganda so far. Where is J.D. Vance? He seems to really like spouting propaganda against the ACA, and he does it particularly artfully. (E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7W1L5iENcI&t=504s , where, at a "Press Conference", he is asked the first question by a "reporter" about "two key Democrat lies".)
He must be too busy with the Iran stuff.
I do hope he has time to join in with the propaganda against the ACA soon! (I do believe it may be necessary for the man's self actualization.)
The same people who always benefit will reap the rewards of this Trump scam: The rich! Trump said himself he doesn't give our economic stress a second thought, and Cuban didn't get to be a multi-billionaire by being Mr. Nice Guy, either!
Direct or cash-pay schemes for Rx don't really scale because 90% of prescriptions are generics - and the margins are razor thin. Walmart has a sizeable (and growing list) of $4 generic drugs and generics are not where big pharma makes most of their money.
When manufacturing margin drops below a certain amount - the manufacturer doesn't just keep lowering their price - they stop manufacturing that drug altogether. As of last April (2025) there were ~270 drug shortages and each shortage affects ~500,000 people. Any savings Cuban passes through may be helpful to a select few - but he's kidding himself if he thinks he's "f*&^ing with healthcare." All he's doing is rearranging deck chairs.
Hi Merrill! Long time!
I come at it differently, being on regular Medicare with a Part D supplement. I'm on a cocktail of meds, so I have no choice but to be on my toes with every script, starting with an annual review of my drug plan.
Even with that, things change - and rather radically. This year, with the $2000+ cap, the cost of the expensive drugs WENT UP - almost so they would game the $2,000 cap. CRAZY!
So, given the prices of some of what I use, including generics that SHOULD be cheap, I use Cost Plus, as I have since it started. Some years, I get multiple meds from them. Some none or one.
I also occasionally check WMT, but it's never been better. (Though it was a lifesaver a number of years ago for one of our dogs, who had diabetes; their insulin prices were impressively lower than everybody else's - and not by a small amount.)
And I also use one that often gets forgotten - GoodRX, because there are times it can save HUNDREDS of dollars, without paying extra for their premium plan. (I'm very serious about that: My wife recently got very ill and had to get a med that is crazy expensive ON our plans. With GoodRX, we reduced the price by hundreds of dollars. THIS IS NUTS!)
I also regularly check independent pharmacy prices, via my supplement's website, for my covered meds or even uncovered drugs, because sometimes they're considerably lower. That's where Cost Plus comes in. THIS IS INSANE!!!!
You and I are lucky, because given our backgrounds, researching this is second nature and even, dare I say, fun. But it's confusing, and I can't imagine how the average person does it.
I didn’t mean to suggest that a patient/consumer couldn’t save money by using one of the mail-order pharmacies. Even I could have saved $20-$30 a year for my generic thru Cost Plus. But who captures the other savings by cutting out the insurer and PBM? Will it result in lower premiums for me or higher profits for CVS Caremark, who manages my drug benefit for Cigna, my supplemental insurance provider? The broader point I was trying to make was that these work around online sellers deal mostly with low cost generics, and do little to address the real cause of escalating drug spending, which is escalating prices for new and still on-patent drugs.
Low-cost generics that somehow can get crazy expensive.
Someone was floating Cuban for president. NOPE. Not another rich guy selling a plan.
Any and I mean ANY COLLABORATION WITH trump is a no for me and mine. He’s separating families again so where’s Congress with this? Mullen/ Holman are still cruel they are just doing it in smaller towns. 22,000 children have had BOTH PARENTS IN DETENTION OR DEPORTED. Over 100,000 children total have been affected. 75% if all the detained : have been shown to be AMERICAN CITIZENS IN THISE THEY HAVE FOCUSEd ON.
You support trump at all yiu support this too!
And the Ep files were due Dec2025!( last yr!!) again forget it trump. Forget Cuban.
I did look up a drug I need and my insurance doesn’t wanna pay for it. Cuban and Amazon doesn’t have it
rosuvastatin is a schedule 1 drug on medicare, it is free with most medicare advantage plans.
I just renewed my 90 day rosuvastatin prescription for $3.00. I’m on Medicare with part D insurance. TrumpRX doesn’t sound like a goo Deal to me.
Merrill et al: To compare TrumpRX with Mark Cuban's drug database is no longer relevant, since Cuban has added his database to Trump's. (I am quite sure one can access Cuban's DB without going thru Trump's, as well as by going thru T's.) To me it is funny that Trump now boasts that TrumpRX has 600+ meds... since a majority (over 550!) are Cuban's.. Also funny is that Cuban is getting flack for "going with" Trump, whom he has been known to detest.. Here is an interesting YouTube video that discusses this strange "marriage." (Again, Cuban is NOT a Trump fan. . not by a long shot. He just wants to help the American public) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G1lgZ9VUDe8 -- And by the way, to people who are on so many meds... maybe some of them were prescribed to treat the side effects of other meds! Gotta watch these docs!!
Nobody that I know!
Since you're a bit on the topic of the ACA, and the cuts that just happened with the expiration of the expanded subsidies on 1/1/26, let me first mention that there is leaked information that CMS has data on large losses in coverage that it has not yet released.
Further, they appear to be preparing to falsely claim the coverage drops are due to reduction of fraud on the exchange. (I think I see some of how this propaganda has been set up--I have stuck that on as a reply to this comment.)
The source is this recent NOTUS story by former Washington Post Reporter Paige Winfield Cunningham, which post seems to access leaked information from people inside of CMS:
https://www.notus.org/healthcare/aca-healthcare-dropped-insurance-numbers-subsidies
Quoting that:
"More than one in five people who enrolled in health insurance through http://healthcare.gov/ during open enrollment and in the weeks immediately following were dropped from coverage for failing to pay their first month’s premium, according to internal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, documents obtained by NOTUS that haven’t been made public.
The roughly 21% decline in enrollment in the 30 states using the federal marketplace is significantly higher than the rate of last year, when 12% of enrollees dropped off over the same time frame.
The numbers support widespread fears that the end of extra, pandemic-era subsidies, which congressional Republicans declined to extend in December, would leave Affordable Care Act plans unaffordable for some Americans.
Faced with such a stark drop in enrollment, leadership at CMS, which is led by Administrator Mehmet Oz, is seeking to attribute a majority of the enrollment declines to rooting out fraud rather than people not paying their premiums, according to three CMS sources. The sources said it’s unlikely fraud is behind most of the cancellations."
(I and other readers of Charles Gaba's substack were pointed to the leaked information in NOTUS by his post: https://charlesgaba.substack.com/p/breaking-cms-admits-over-30-million )
Charles conclusion is that it looks like, of 24 million people who had on-exchange ACA coverage, about 3 million (12%) are without coverage as of the current time this year, due to the lapsing of the ACA expanded subsidies on Jan 1, 2026.
ADDING BACKGROUND--initial limited (released) CMS data, and data rolling in from non-CMS sources:
The information here is part of the new data that continuously rolls in, as initial very limited open-enrollment-period only data, which counts people auto-renewed as having coverage, even if they don't wind up paying the premium, gets superseded. (That limited initial data showed only a 4.9% coverage drop for those 24 million.)
I point out that there is a recent excellent New York Times article that is also reporting that kind of later information https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/business/obamacare-enrollment-decline.html .
(Also, new 5/19/2026, from KFF https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/what-we-know-so-far-about-2026-aca-marketplace-enrollment-premiums-and-deductibles/ . Probably a better, more comprehensive source than the Times article)
Also, I might as well toss in unique reporting by both Charles Gaba and myself that, in order to try to get themselves under the returned 400% of Federal Poverty Level (FPL) "subsidy cliff", and avoid premium jumps of up to tens of thousands of dollars from what they paid last year, a few hundred thousand people seem to have pushed their income under the "subsidy cliff". Some will have done this legitimately, by working less or other legal means. Others of them will find, if their income is over the subsidy cliff at tax-filing time in 2027, that they have to pay the up to tens of thousands of dollars they thought they were saving back to the federal government. (A very unpleasant surprise, indeed! ; For those interested in how we figured that out , details are to be found within this comment: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/unlocked-repost-curing-us-health/comment/255658440 . )
Appending: Details on what may be the outline of the propaganda claiming the CMS data, when released, showing large coverage drops, is due to mainly fraud reduction.
I am using a recent New York Times story mentioning the “Paragon Health Institute” and fraud in California ,
It's this article a few days ago in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/us/politics/vance-medicaid-fraud-california.html
where there is talk of the Trump administration witholding $1.3 billion dollars in Medicaid payments to California based on fraud allegations.
There is also mention of Dr. Oz, head of CMS, speaking at an event hosted by the Paragon Health Institute, talking about the fraud, saying “something is clearly wrong”.
Now "Paragon Health Institute", and Dr. Oz, both even separately, suggest to me propaganda and, at best, erroneous analyses. With the one at an event hosted by the other, the suggestion becomes overwhelming.
My Reasons:
1) The Paragon Health Institute has been involved in some analysis that I, and some organizations with large technical staffs, have questioned.
1a) Paragon Health Institute has attacked the ACA based on findings of fraud, which findings were based substantially on ACA “zero-claim enrollees”, being people with an ACA plan, who never file a claim.
I looked into this, and Paragon’s general policy advice, a bit myself within these two posts from months ago:
https://normspier828307.substack.com/p/who-are-the-economic-advisors-who
and
https://normspier828307.substack.com/p/who-are-the-economic-advisors-who-5ef
and, not only did many of the analyses look fishy to me, but, as on that second post, I found out that several organizations with large technical staffs also took issue with the analyses.
For example, from the American Hospital Association (https://www.aha.org/news/blog/2025-08-28-setting-record-straight-separating-fact-fiction-health-insurance-marketplace-fraud)
It is therefore imperative that policymakers understand that Paragon developed these allegations using inaccurate data, dubious assumptions, and an apparent lack of understanding of how health insurance actually works.
(Incidentally, about 6 months ago Paul Krugman addressed the how insurance actually works issue, with an example of you can have fire insurance, and not filing a claim does not mean you shouldn’t have had insurance. He did not attack Paragon, or its head, Dr. Brian Blase, by name, but he must have been thinking of those fraud allegations. That Krugman post is: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-republican-brain-doesnt-want )
See also this post from last year https://www.thebulwark.com/p/a-massive-health-care-shock-is-coming-aca-obamacare-assistance-cliff by Jonathan Cohn mentioning Paragon and its leader, Dr. Brian Blase.
1b) Paragon Health Institute produced a graph which was used by both Senate Majority Leader John Thune (in this video, from the day the Senate voted against extending the expanded subsidies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWmkb_rdUrI&t=287s) and House Majority Leader Mike Johnson (in this tweet:
https://x.com/SpeakerJohnson/status/2000690200008139250?s=20 ) to justify not exending the ACA expanded subsidies
The graph is labelled, and purports to show, “Obamacare Plan Premiums Have Increased Nearly 2x Faster than Employer-Based Premiums Since 2014”, and is to be found here: https://paragoninstitute.org/paragon-pic/obamacare-plan-premiums-have-increased-nearly-2x-faster-than-employer-based-premiums-since-2014/
Now, the thing is, I’m pretty sure that graph is completely erroneous, due to mainly an omission of a certain cost, and a shifting of one of the graphs. When I tried to adjust for the errors, I got that the ACA plan cost tracked in the graph rose either slightly more, or slightly less, than employer-based plan.
(I’ll spare the details here. But I have them, and my alternative correction attempt here: https://normspier828307.substack.com/p/senate-republican-leader-john-thune , if interested.)
2) Dr. Oz himself is cause to suspect propaganda.
2a) Note this propagandstic-setup collaboration with Fox from a few months ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z4GhR94KRI
2b) More technical, but there is a case where Dr. Oz seems to indicate that something that the Republicans are trying to do makes ACA coverage cheaper when it actually does the EXACT OPPOSITE. (That’s within here: https://normspier828307.substack.com/p/cost-sharing-reductions-silver-loading , though I warn you, it is quite technical around “cost-sharing-reductions” and “silver loading”.)
3) There is a general playing on many of the voters not having a sense of numerical quantities.
The total federal spending on healthcare is $1.9 trillion ($1900 billion) a year, and, incidentally, the OBBB Medicaid and ACA expanded subsidy cuts that the shutdown of late last year was trying to reverse are $150 billion a year.
So, the numerically-skilled mind sees federal share of healthcare spending in California is about $190 billion a year (since CA has almost exactly 10% of the U.S. population), and the $1.3 billion withheld according to the Times story, let’s say it really is because of fraud, is about 1/150 of the spending.
Ditto if you take the Dr. Oz / Fox fraud by “Criminal Illegal Immigrants”. $1 billion, compared to $1900 billion a year in total federal medical expenditures, or even the $150 billion a year the Republicans have cut (combined OBBB and lapsed ACA expanded subsidies.)
--
P.S. I am curious as to why only Dr. Oz and Paragon are involved in the propaganda so far. Where is J.D. Vance? He seems to really like spouting propaganda against the ACA, and he does it particularly artfully. (E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7W1L5iENcI&t=504s , where, at a "Press Conference", he is asked the first question by a "reporter" about "two key Democrat lies".)
He must be too busy with the Iran stuff.
I do hope he has time to join in with the propaganda against the ACA soon! (I do believe it may be necessary for the man's self actualization.)